Movie audiences are familiar with browsing for video movies in video rental stores. These stores offer hundreds to thousands of videos that are conveniently arranged in racks throughout a physical building space. Typically, the videos are grouped according to different categories. For instance, videos are grouped by kind, such as new releases, oldies, westerns, foreign films, family films, video games, and so forth. Other groupings might be by actor/actress name, alphabetical order of title, or topic. The movie groups assist shoppers in locating a video section of the store that interests them. The shopper can then limit his/her search for a suitable video to that section.
Newer, interactive television (ITV) systems are now bringing the video store to peoples'homes. ITV systems have a single computerized control center, known as the "headend", which interactively communicates with multiple distributed television units located in subscriber homes. The headend provides traditional forms of programming, such as the familiar cable and broadcast programs, as well as newer forms of programming, such as video-on-demand. In the video-on-demand (VOD) mode of operation, a viewer can order video movies directly from his/her own television set. Indeed, in a full interactive entertainment network system like this invention, it is contemplated that a viewer will be able to order "on demand" movies, video games, television shows, and other video content programs from their home.
It would be advantageous for an ITV system to provide movies in a convenient organized fashion like that afforded by a video store. Unfortunately, unlike a video store which has an abundance of physical floor space to present many different movies, the ITV system only has limited space available on a TV screen to present the options. Due to the space constraints, the ITV system is limited to displaying short lists of movies for possible rental. Browsing through hundreds or thousands of movie titles using short lists is fairly cumbersome for a viewer. This inconvenience is multiplied if the viewer is forced to revisit the selection process of the entire, overwhelmingly large database of movies each time he/she wants to rent a video.
Accordingly, one object of this invention is to provide an ITV system with a convenient way to manage lists of movies according to the preferences of each viewer.
Another issue that often arises when renting video movies is the dilemma of selecting one or two movies from among all of the available choices. After browsing for a good length of time, a shopper commonly weeds out a vast majority of the video options to arrive at several movies of interest. From this filtered selection, the shopper selects one or two movies for rental, a process which can be particularly tough if two or more people are shopping together. The non-selected videos are returned to the shelf with the shopper resolving to remember the other selections for "next time". On the next trip to the video store, however, the shopper has inevitably forgotten the previous selections and thus repeats the entire filter-and-select process, again consuming a tremendous amount of browsing time.
In the ITV environment, where short lists and menus arc presented, a viewer might experience difficulty in browsing through lists and then returning to one list to rent a particular movie. This task is different than the video store arena where the shopper simply returns to the physical racks which hold the movies of interest. Many individuals are not accustomed to manipulating selections using computer user interfaces, and might find them less intuitive than physically walking to the same section of the video store each time to rent movies of interest. The additional problem of "remembering" other movies of interest in the ITV setting is equally daunting because the viewer must not only remember the movies themselves, but must also remember how to intelligently traverse through the various screen menus to find these movies.
Accordingly, another object of this invention is to provide an ITV system that allows a viewer to easily identify movies of interest.